Grace— disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency

I went to Merriam for that definition of grace. I noticed that there were a grand total of eight categories with sub-definitions below them. So, if something else were coming to your mind you are likely also right. The definition above just happens to fit what I’m thinking in the moment.

Further defining terms we find that clemency can be defined as “an act or instance of mercy, compassion, or forgiveness see also amnesty, commute, pardon, reprieve.” In these trying times, forgiveness can be difficult. I wrote a piece earlier about forgiveness and I invite everyone to take a look. It is essentially a state of being and a realization more than anything else.

I say all this because a friend reacted angrily and in a bizarre manner to a piece I wrote last week. The initial reaction is usually one of defense. The response claimed I had said and done things that I had never said or done. So, the first reaction is to go through the rolodex of memories to try to determine where that was coming from. You then move onto anger. When someone clearly says you have said things you’ve never said or done things you’ve never done it can be bewildering and infuriating at the same time.

I’ve quickly moved on. Some of my other friends have not. The difficulty is that these things are all public now. Everyone on my friends list can see and as you’d expect they run the gamut. So, some friends want to defend me. Some probably feel the frustration by proxy.

I am asking for one simple thing: grace. That grace can go any number of different directions. It can obviously go to me as I am not going to turn down anyone or anything’s grace. However, it should also go to my friend. He is a decent person that might be triggered by some powerful feelings, confusion, and a boat load of misinformation.

One of the things he accused me of is being compliant. I find that term to be pretty charged in the way he intended it, but it is an ironic term. We are all compliant to something or someone. Someone that professes to be Christian (as he and I both do) are compliant to the word of God or at least our own interpretation of the word of God. He meant to political authority figures or prominent experts in a field.

I plead guilty to that one. One of the best things we have done as a species is specialize. When it comes to a world wide pandemic I’m going to trust an immunologist who has studied viruses for more than 50 years over my own best judgments and instincts. I got a D in college Biology. I felt like I understood the material better than that, but not much better.

Regardless of party or ideology, we have an absolute epidemic of people deciding they know as much as experts because they saw a YouTube video their cousin sent them. We have parents or even private citizens deciding we are teaching things in school we have never taught based on absolutely zero evidence. Instead of asking us they “do their own research.”

Someone famous once decried people that know things that just aren’t so. False knowledge is worse than ignorance. It rots the brain and causes people to believe things that have no basis in reality. I can’t hate people like this. I want to offer them love and support and will do as much as I can. That might be my own failing, but that is what it is.

Texas CD-13’s Ronny Jackson has a problem with his past, (present, and future tenses). Time is a human construct, but it would seem to be somewhat of an elusive concept to the Texas congressman.

I shall explain.

On his congressional website, Jackson refers to himself as a “retired Rear Admiral.” As in

“As a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral with nearly three decades of military service I understand the commitment and sacrifices made by servicemen and servicewomen to serve our country.”

or

“In December 2019, after 25 years of distinguished service to his country, Dr. Jackson retired from the United States Navy as a Rear Admiral.”

Ronny Jackson is not a retired Rear Admiral.

Not anymore.

Before his congressional job, Dr. Jackson was TFG’s favorite doctor who once claimed that, except for his dietary choices, TFG “might live to be live to be 200 years old.”

200 years. That’s a lot of time for a human lifespan.

But not everyone was held in high esteem by Jackson. As explained in a DOD inspector general report released in March 2021, Jackson was abusive to doctors and nurses on his staff at the White House, and “established a workplace where fear and intimidation were kind of hallmarks with him…”.

As a result of the report, Ronny Jackson was demoted to Captain in July 2022, which was retroactively applied back to his 2019 retirement.

And while his past demotion is yet to be noted in the present on his congressional website, his retirement pension certainly does reflect his present rank.

Time problems tend to follow Ronny around.

In a March 13, 2024 local news article, Jackson’s efforts for his district were touted: “Due to Jackson’s efforts, over $200 million specifically designated for the district was included in” the Fiscal Year 2024 Government funding package.

Great, huh? What a wonderful provider for his district.

But only 9 days into the future, the same Ronny Jackson voted against the same funding package. His vote is listed there among the 134 Nay votes in the March 22, 2024 vote.

Albert Einstein once wrote:

“The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

I can only conclude that Einstein’s proposition might be playing itself out in Ronny Jackson’s own mind.

I’ve been trying to think of another New York trial to compare with the one underway right now in Manhattan -- you know, the one that finally empaneled a jury and scheduled opening statements for Monday.  Turns out that it isn’t a trial that comes to mind but a defendant, so-called “Teflon Don” John Gotti, because of the number of trials it took to finally get a conviction.

Gotti was tried and acquitted twice in the late 1980’s for racketeering and assault before they got him in 1992.  In Gotti’s racketeering trial in 1986, jury tampering by Gotti led to an acquittal on charges of murder, truck hijacking, illegal gambling, and loansharking.  Gotti had scored a ringer juror who had lied about his relationship with a leader of the Hell’s Kitchen “Westies” mob to get on the jury.  Gotti had his associates pay the juror $60,000.  When jury deliberations began, most jurors were for conviction, but when Gotti’s plant held out for acquittal, the rest of the jury became so frightened for their own safety, they ended up voting to acquit Gotti on all charges.  Five years later, the paid-off Gotti juror would be convicted of obstruction of justice for fixing the jury verdict.  He was sentenced to three years in prison.

The 1992 Gotti trial in Brooklyn was the first New York trial with an anonymous jury that was sequestered for the length of the trial because of Gotti’s history of jury tampering.  Using taped conversations from Gotti’s Mulberry Street Ravenite Social Club and testimony by a Gotti lieutenant, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, who turned state’s evidence and confessed on the stand to 19 murders linking Gotti to four of them, Gotti was convicted by the sequestered, anonymous jury after only 14 hours of deliberation and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.  Gotti was repeatedly threatened with expulsion from the courtroom by the judge when he yelled at Gravano and other witnesses accusing them of lying and drug use.

Gotti’s trials got the kind of coverage the trial of Donald Trump is getting – screaming headlines in the tabloids, televised reports outside the courthouse, everything but the kind of wall-to-wall expert legal analysis we get these days on cable news, although former defense attorneys and prosecutors would occasionally be interviewed for their opinions on nightly local news. 

What was missing in those days, however, was the overall threat of violence by Trump supporters that hangs over this trial.  Fox News has featured a kind of contest for viewers to come up with the identities of anonymous jurors, which has already led to one juror being excused from duty because she feared for her safety after friends and family reported to her that speculation was rife on the internet about her identity.  The jurors who acquitted Gotti in his first racketeering trial were afraid for their own safety not because their identities were public, but because remarks in the jury room by Gotti’s secretly-planted and paid-for juror had put them in fear.

Gotti was famous for his thousand-dollar suits and white-on-white tie and shirt combos, and when he wasn’t in pre-trail detention, Gotti put on a show on New York sidewalks, waving to members of the press and the public on his way to and from court.  Gotti’s confident demeanor was never about seeming innocent – he wasn’t, and he made no attempt to appear innocent – but to show his power as a mob boss.  Everyone in New York knew he was the head of one of New York’s mob families.  Everyone knew he had ordered killings and had made a fortune committing crimes large and small. 

Donald Trump tries his best to put on the same kind of show when he leaves court every day.  His campaign has made no secret of its plan to use his trial as daily campaign appearances. 

But Donald Trump is no John Gotti.  He’s been cautioned for muttering and gesturing, rather than yelling, and at least three times he has fallen completely asleep at the defense table, chin on chest, head lolling.  Outside the court, Trump is not happy and confident.  Yesterday, he stood before the cameras waving around a sheaf of print-outs of positive reviews from the day’s news coverage.  He rattles off the names of conservative “legal experts,” as he calls them, and “every one of them is outraged,” he assures us, “Jonathan Turley, Gregg Jarrett, Andrew McCarthy—even the Rolling Stone, no friend of mine, they don’t like Bragg’s chances on this case.  It’s a disgrace.”

It turns out that Trump has a member of his communications team, Natalie Harp, a former “One America News” anchor whose job, according to a report by Maggie Haberman, is to use a laptop and wireless printer to print out “an ongoing stream of good news from the internet" for Trump.  Here she is outside the court with other Trump aides, one of whom is apparently carrying the laptop and shouldering the wireless printer for her. 

Here’s where it gets delicious.  After Trump waves around his wireless printouts to make sure the press corps is up on his popularity away from New York, which has spit him out like a bite out of a big apple with a worm in it, Trump gives his own review of the day’s proceedings.  “It’s freezing in there,” he whines. He needs his blankie:

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"The spear, the bow, the gun, and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power. Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time."
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Jewish Space Lasers Lady is back.

The Republican from Georgia (which sounds like the title of a 1950s science fiction pulp novel) Marjorie Taylor Greene, submitted an amendment to the Israel Aid funding bill that, if approved, would provide funds to "develop space laser technology for use on the Southern Border." 

Space laser technology.

For use on the Southern Border. 

Space lasers.

Again. I mean, you remember the space lasers, right? 

But what do I know? Greene asks. I just like to read a lot. 

She likes to read nutty antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Rothschild Investment Corporation and and she likes to imagine "The Jews" have some secret space program so advanced it can launch industrial grade orbital solar power stations without anyone actually noticing but some smelly beardo in a dirty bathrobe living in a run down trailer somewhere in West Virginia and posting his "findings" to Truth Social. And not just those launches, but somehow vast orbital acres of highly reflective solar panels necessary to such installations have likewise somehow gone unnoticed by not only military, government, and academic observatories but those amateur telescope wranglers who track everything from SpaceX launches to the International Space Station. 

But, yeah, what would she know, right? 

Greene says America deserves the "same type of defense for our border that Israel has and proudly uses." (emphasis mine).

Has and proudly uses. 

Space lasers. 

Apparently she thinks Israel has space lasers. Which they use to defend their borders (and if that's the case, it's hardly an advertisement given the current state of affairs). This system Which I guess was lofted by the vast Israeli space program is also used to start forest fires in California on the orders of some secret Jewish investment bank because something something gazpacho and sure it sounds crazy when you say it out loud on social media but that doesn't mean it's not actually bugfuck insane, does it?

Folks, we really have to stop electing lunatics to run our government. 

Yes, even you, Georgia. Seriously, just stop it. 

That said, imagine it. 

No, really, imagine weapons grade lasers in orbit.

Space-based laser weapons powerful enough to punch through 200km of increasingly thick atmosphere with enough energy to ... what exactly? fry people and vehicles on the ground? Start forest fires? defend Israeli borders? burn ants? I don't know and the amendment doesn't say, but, imagine that weapon. 

Imagine what you could do with it, not just on the border, but anywhere, anytime, against anyone. 

Now, imagine giving control of that weapon to ... who? Trump? Biden? Booger eating crazypants Ex-General Flynn? The Arizona Supreme Court? Who?

Yes, imagine that. 

But then, you don't have to imagine it. 

We already have this, you know. 

Well, not have have, but we've got fully developed engineering plans for a similar weapons system. One that would have actually worked. 

Project Thor. 

That's right: Rods from God. The finger of death, smiting the sinners from upon high. 

Orbital-based Kinetic Bombardment. 

And if the sound of that doesn't scare the shit out of you, you've never read enough military science fiction. 

Except it wasn't fiction. 

The whole thing was thought up back in the 1980s by a bunch of science fiction writers and NASA engineers led by Dr. Jerry Pournelle (who was both). Thor is a fully fleshed-out design for kinetic energy weapons. Telephone pole sized solid tungsten rods, dropped from low orbit. A satellite might hold a dozen or more of these missiles. You can drop one or all of them at once, then a solid fuel rocket engine deorbits the Thor impactor and simple basic missile electronics guide it precisely to target (you wonder why we ever developed something so expensive as the GPS system? You didn't think it was for the public good did you?). Tons of metal moving at hypersonic velocity, you don't need a warhead or explosives. Depending on a number of variables, the impact energy of these things could be measured in kilotons. They could hit nearly anywhere on earth's surface with the power of a nuclear bomb, a manmade meteor. No radiation, no fallout. You could drop one or a hundred, or thousands, globally, all at once. Scalable, flexible, the system could target a tank column or a missile silo, a single building or an entire city, a battle group at sea or even submerged submarines. 

Simple and elegant in design -- if elegant is a word you associate with mass death from the sky. 

You don't need any new technology. The materials and engineering have existed for decades. We could have built a basic system as far back as the 1970s. 

There could be no defense against it.

It was developed as part of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program. It was expensive and it would get more expensive the more satellites you put into orbit (it got cheaper if you had a reusable launch system, hey, and now you know some of the impetus behind the Shuttle's development and why Reagan was willing to keep funding it) but not nearly as expensive as maintaining a massive nuclear arsenal and the associated delivery systems (except the Shuttle vastly exceeded its design and operating budgets and never even came close to lowering the cost of launching material into orbit, and it turned out the nuke ICBMs were cheaper after all). 

But it wasn't the expense that ultimately canceled the program, so much as the idea of the sheer power of such a weapon.

You see, Thor, once implemented, could be used to impose an ironclad dictatorship over friend and foe alike.

You could use it against targets in the Middle East and the Soviet Union (remember, it was still the Cold War), but you could also use it against uppity Americans. Or your allies, if they forgot who their friends were. 

Now, there were certainly those who salivated at the idea of such power, but eventually it was cancelled before any serious hardware was constructed. They never got a working platform into space (probably).

But...

If we had built it, can you imagine handing over control of such a thing to Donald Trump in 2016? The power of surgical strike tactical and/or strategic nuclear weapons without the associated downside of radiation, EMP, and long term contamination? Can you imagine handing control of that system over to the guy who wanted to know why we couldn't just nuke a hurricane? The guy who gleefully bragged on worldwide TV about dropping the "Mother of all Bombs" on Afghanistan?

That guy? 

Can you? 

Can you imagine that?

Who would he have used such weapons on? Think about that. Think about that power in any president's hands. 

I know Marjorie Taylor Greene is thinking about such power right now. 

I know she is. I don't have to guess. She told us. She keeps telling us.

That's all she and her ilk think about.

The power of God. And using it on us, those she considers undesirable and where have we heard this sort of thing before?

Yes, of course, Greene's amendment is idiotic. 

We're not going to build space lasers. Not yet. Not now. For the same reasons we didn't build Thor. We won't build Space Lasers for a lot of reasons. 

But this isn't really about that, is it?

It's about how these vile people think. 

It's about how they dream of having the absolute power of gods, being able to send down lightning from the heavens and fry the people they hate. Us.

The state of the art -- and the limitations of the budget -- won't let them do that. Yet.

But that doesn't make us safe from our leaders who dream about killing us. 

If you let them have power, they'll find a way to eliminate those they despise and they won't need science fiction weapons to do it. Whether it's cattle cars, camps, cyanide showers, and gas chambers or something more modern, they'll find a way just as those of their evil ilk always have. 

Because that's all they dream about. 

It's all they dream about. They tell you this in speeches, in their social media posts, in every amendment they write. They can not go a single minute without fantasizing about mass murder. 

Those like Marjorie Taylor Greene, like Trump, like the modern Republican Party, they don't build better futures. Not even for themselves. 

The only things they build are walls. 

The only things they create are new ways to to commit mass murder.

Their gods are hate and fear and profit. 

If you give them power, they'll use it to kill. To burn. To destroy. To tear down civilization and bury history in mass graves next to all those they despise. They told us so. 

It's all they dream about.

It's right there in their words, they don't even try to hide it. 

It's aways fascinating to me, the irony when someone whose entire identity is vested in some charismatic wannabe dictator calls me a communist.

A communist. 

Fuck. 

I'm not a communist. Never have been. And in fact I spent a not insignificant fraction of my adult life in the uniform of my country standing against communism. I despise communism. 

I'm not even a socialist -- not that these drooling halfwits can tell the difference between socialism and communism, or care to find out.

Hell, I barely qualify as a liberal most of the time. 

And you wouldn't have to read very far back in the annuals of this blog to figure that out. But the truly ironic part is where most of these people proudly wear their Christianity on their sleeve. A religion whose own founding prophet allegedly told his adherents in no uncertain terms: feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven, judge not least ye by judged... 

And we could have done that. 

Even if you don't believe in that god, even if you don't adhere to that religion, those are good ideas. Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor. Heal the sick. The Golden Rule. We could have done all of that. We could have fed everyone by now. We could have clothed and sheltered everyone on the planet. We could have healed almost everyone, or at least made sure everyone had effective quality medical care. We could all be wealthy. We could all be entitled to liberty and justice. We could have made this world a paradise for all, instead of embracing an ideology that promises salvation to only a select few and eternal misery to all the rest. 

We could have done that.

Mad?

You damn right, I'm mad. 

Scared?

Yes, that too. 

I'm fucking furious at all the things we could have dared, and did not. 

I'm terrified of what these dirty rotten selfish greedy miserable fanatical sons of bitches will do next, should we let them have power again. 

We better show up. 

We better do our duty. 

We'd better stand fast, shoulder to shoulder, against the fall of night, or one day real soon they'll find a way to burn us all down and civilization along with us. 

You want a better nation? 

Hell, you want a future where our leaders don't dream about murdering us? 

Then you have to be a better citizen. That's where it starts. 

 

"Pffaww, They're a pair! They don't like anything. They don't even like the dachshund. Who doesn't like dachshunds? They're little parcels of dog-shaped goodness. I've known Jalabite Hegemon ships that give up conquest and start little farmsteads just so they can have happy dachshunds. Everyone likes dachshunds, everywhere in the universe. Well, except on Bithomorency. People there got into a war with a refugee column of evolutionarily advanced dachshund super soldiers fleeing the destruction of their home world. The wire-haired marines took out an entire town. Two hundred thousand dead. And it was a tragic misunderstanding. The dachshunds only stopped to ask for some biscuits, automated defense systems fired on them. There's a lesson: never give control of your space weapons to an unsupervised machine. Schoolboy error.”
― Nick Harkaway, Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses

Across MAGAland, there is a new villain threatening Donald Trump, and there’s no rule that says the things they’re accusing him of have to be real.

Jack Posobiec, self-appointed internet provocateur and Trump fan, headed to Twitter on Monday to complain, declaring that Judge Juan Merchan was threatening to arrest Trump for missing a day of court to attend his son Barron Trump’s graduation.

Now, others are chiming in, calling Merchan “evil” and “disgusting” for not allowing a man to see his youngest child graduate.

The only problem is that Judge Merchan has issued no such order.

In fact, Merchan is giving a lot of leeway in scheduling, skipping days for Passover, asking jurors for days that they need to be away for religious holidays, and skipping Wednesdays altogether. As for May 17, when Trump says he needs the day off to attend a graduation, he said he won’t rule yet, but will wait to see if the proceedings are on schedule, accordingto Inner City Press.

That means that the defense could help accommodate the requested absence by simply not drawing things out as long as possible, but delay is a standard tactic in the Trump bag of tricks.

Trump’s fans are irate, however, over the order that they mistakenly think was handed down, though. Jason Miller, a senior advisor to Trump, turned to social media to moan, too. He tweeted, spreading the misleading propaganda:

“This is how disgusting the Biden Trial has become. Not even letting the President attend his son’s high school graduation. Nothing but a political attack.”

His post clearly reached a lot of angry fans, because he received a lot of responses musing about the optics of Trump being arrested at his son’s graduation, or about Trump skipping court and daring the judge to order his arrest.

While it is true that Trump was warned that his absence could lead to a warrant being issued, that caveat was part of the standard warnings that criminal defendants are given, and was not in direct connection to the graduation request.

Other Trump fans tweeted further musings, such as whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would protect his former presidential rival by preventing his arrest.

Another claimed that Trump had already been forced to miss being by Melania Trump’s side when her mother died, and that having to miss Barron’s graduation as well is just more evidence that accused felon is being prosecuted by “evil.”

(Trump elected to be in court after his mother-in-law died, and traveled to rallies both before and after his appearance; he was not even required to be present in that case. This time, it’s a criminal charge rather than civil proceedings, and criminal defendants are typically expected to show up.)

Trump himself has not made any direct response to the lack of ruling yet, nor to the false claims that a ruling was issued. Let’s see what he posts on TruthSocial tonight, however.

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post TEMPEST: What’s the OUTRAGE over the Barron Trump high school graduation? appeared first on Occupy Democrats.